Diane Zydlewski, Florencia Gabriele, and Meaghan Price presented at Open Ed 2021 on “History of Economic Thought Made Alive Through Artifacts – A Collaborative Book.” They are all at Emmanuel College. Florencia Gabriele is a lecturer and has used this assignment in which students analyze passages in books and contribute to a book. The course is ECON 2101: History of Economic Thought taken by economics majors and primarily sophomores and juniors. Gabriele explained that OERs allow for customization and incorporation of multimedia. Using Open Pedagogy is defined by Gabriele as the “practice of engaging students as creators of information rather than consumers.” Gabriele spoke about participants sharing their work and engaging with content on a deeper level. The materials participants create can be used in future courses. Gabriele talked about OER and cost savings for students and wanted to explore the best way of sharing materials with students. After polling students, most wanted to read and watch videos. With this project, Gabriele aimed to tackle several issues including cost, engagement, and community. They were inspired by the work of DeRosa. Zydlewski is a librarian and spoke about copyright and ‘public domain.’ For this project, copyright may have expired for some of the works. Price explained the project and how students worked collaboratively to create a reader for class. Price worked on developing the project. It was assigned as extra credit and optional. Price also contributed to the work with teammates. There were five current students involved in the project in addition to Price. Even though they had a small sample size, they decided to survey students about the experience. Student responses indicated that they found the experience enjoyable and useful for exam review. They will use Presbooks for the project. Gabriele is now deciding whether to continue doing this assignment as an extra credit or a group project. Gabriele emphasized the need to plan and work as a team. I thought it was important to learn from Gabriele how deadlines or milestones are important for the project’s success and to encourage the addition of multimedia. Also, it is important to connect the material with current events. This made me think about the MUSIC model I learned about from a Lilly Conference recorded session I watched earlier today and how their models highlighted the impact of student interest. I love how Pressbooks works are being used as outlets for collaborative work and want to revisit this.
